Are You On My List?
By NYT Bestseller Dianna Love
People ask me all the time in interviews, “If you could meet anybody, who would it be?” They usually want a short sentence or two—a sound bite–so I never get to tell them there are four answers to that question. For three of them, I’d have to time travel.
My first person would be Leonardo Da Vinci, but not because of the recent movie and books. And honestly, not even because of his amazing paintings. I’ve been fascinated by him since I was young, because he was an artist who was right brain/left brain, like me.
Oh, I definitely admire his artistic ability in creating paintings like the Mona Lisa and Last Supper, but I would love to talk to him about his inventions and ideas such as the “Helical Air Screw”– drawings from the fifteenth-century of a rotary-wing flying apparatus. He drew those sketches hundreds of years before the first helicopter was built in the 1940’s. Scattered drawings have been found of his “robotic knight,” and he had an early design for an “armored car” (tank type vehicle) with light cannons on a circular platform that could rotate all the way around for battles.
What would it be like to just hear this man talk on his ideas?
The second person I’d like to meet would be John D. MacDonald, one of my all time favorite authors. I want to ask him about his Travis McGee character. So many of us fell in love with that series that it resulted in a string of movies and over 75million books in print. Fans like me still hoard all the original copies of the series. I’d like to sit with him on Travis McGee’s boat, the Busted Flush, in Slip 18 and ask John where he came up with ideas for the books that always left me yearning for the next one. It broke my heart when he died in 1986 and left a gaping hole in my TBR stack for a long time.
Person number three on my list is Gutzon Borglum.
How many of you just said, “Who?”
That’s okay, because to be aware of him, you’d have to be fascinated by huge sculpture the way I am. I’ve been drawing, painting and sculpting since I was very small and have always gravitated to gigantic sculptures. I started life as an artist painting huge murals, but eventually I shifted to creating three-dimensional art projects. It was just natural for me to sculpt 35′ tall Coca-Cola bottles or 16′ wide chocolate chip cookies or giant Longhorn “horns” that extended off of billboards or buildings.
That’s why I couldn’t wait to ride my motorcycle across country a couple years ago to see Mount Rushmore, which Gutzon Borglum and his son sculpted (along with a crew of helpers). That sculpture covers 1278 acres.
Okay, I can’t time travel, so I can’t meet any of those three people. But I CAN meet the fourth person on my list, and it’s really a group of people. It’s you—the readers.
Meeting readers is my favorite part of being an author. That’s why I’m riding across country on my motorcycle starting September 18th for the release of THE CURSE and going through 8 states. I’ll stop along the way to sign books in bookstores each day, and I’m looking forward to events in three cities. – Bowling Green, KY, Indianapolis, IN, and Greenville, SC. I’d love to meet you and say hello, so come out, chat with me and get your books or Keeper Kase CardsTM signed. Details for all the stops I’m making are on the Appearance page of my website, and I’ll be giving away Keeper Kase CardsTM at all three events.
You aren’t collecting the new Keeper Kase CardsTM yet? All the details are at www.KeeperKase.com.
If you can’t make it to one of the events, you can still join me on my moto-journey by going to the Two-Wheel Journal page of my website. Follow the trip and see some of the cool places we stop and the wonderful people I meet…like you!
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